Jason Perlow

Interesting, I've never heard of Botran Solera, they didnt have it at the Penthouse Rum Festival at the Zacapa/Botran booth. The Masaya and Santa Teresa sound very nice as well. From your list its clear you like the really brandy-style sweeter aged rums. Personally I really like the Cruzan Single Barrel since it is similar to a scotch in its flavor characteristics, I drink it with a little ice. Flor De Cana is also another one of those kinds of rums, the 7 is very much like a scotch, the 12 even more so. The others you mention I drink neat, since they are much more syrupy/cognac like and require some warmth to bring the flavor out.

Welcome Anant! We've heard great things about your product -- can't wait to try it here in the states.

I didn't try the whalers at the Rumfest. I've never really regarded them as a premium rum company, so I was dissuaded from tasting it.

Rachel suggested that we might bring a selection of salamis from arthur ave.

Now I'm hungry for gyros. Let me know how the recipe turns out.

Oregano, Rosemary and Garlic I would imagine. Dried, not fresh. Edit: Just found this thru a yahoo search:

Mediterranean Manor is on Jefferson, Seabra's Rodizio is a different joint. I beleive they are owned by the same people but I have been told MM is better, I've never been to Seabra's Rodizio. Casa Vasca is on Lafayette, in a very residential area and is considered by many to be the best traditional Spanish restaurant out of all of them. You might be thinking about Spanish Sangria which is in an industrial area, but a lot of these places are basically a half a mile from each other, Ironbound isnt very big.

PAC is about 5 minutes from Ironbound. Maybe 10 if you hit serious traffic. Casa Vasca or Seabra's Mediterranean Manor are your best bets. Definitely NO to Spanish Sangria and Fornos.

Thats ridiculous. You're gonna go to this thing?

You're right. Thats highway robbery. You could eat like a chazir for $375 per person at ADNY, GT, Daniel or even off Blue Hill's regular menu for that kind of money. I'm assuming this is a charity event, because lord knows why else they would be charging that much.

You don't need to remind us. Actually, about half the kitchen is unpaid and we don't have to pay it off until next June, since its on the Expo credit card. My grandfather did general contracting for over 30 years and told me that to take over 4 months for a kitchen remodel like ours is "unconscionable", to use his exact words. Needless to say, there were a lot of extenuating circumstances that were totally out of our control that contributed to these delays which we are not at all happy with.

I was actually going to pose this question on the Site Tips forum, but isn't there some sort of adminstrative way to combine threads after the fact? I know we duplicate threads a lot (Rebecca's in Edgewater has FOUR... or maybe five!) Don't get me wrong, I know it's our responsibility to shoot for coherence as users, but is there a management solution to undo some of the clutter that's already lying around? We'll have the technology to do that in Invision Board 1.1 .

And, I had the kind that Jaymes mentioned in Taiwan in 1969. Right, but when did they move from grates on top of oil drums to the special restaurant-style mongolian stoves, and creating restaurants based on it?

Well it does seem that Polish people do not understand irony. Polish Jew. Big difference. Don't confuse the two. Twice as stubborn and twice as thick headed. I know, I'm one of them.

Fascinating. Who knew Ghengis Khan, the most fearsome barbarian warrior in history was an eGulleteer. and a master caterer. Think of the conversations he would have with Plotnicki. Plotnicki: "real conisseurs of Mongolian food only eat the meat. The vegetables are for tourists." Khan: "You are a fool, and I shall spear your head on a pike for your insolence and rape your pets in front of your children for my amusement when I am done! Even a Han weakling can see that the veggies are necessary for a full balanced meal!"

It would be good if we could find some facts on this to get this totally straight. I'm wondering how long in Taiwan they have been producing those large, specialized gas fired griddles though, and how it evolved from the primitive wood fired oil barrels with the grates you are talking about.

EDIT: Should add that I fully understand that in the Chinese view, 34 years is but a blink of an eye and that even something invented 100 years ago would still be referred to as being "fairly recent." My understanding that is far as the formulization or commercializing of "themed" mongolian style restaurants of the type we are describing have only been around 20-25 years. But yes, as far as the history of the various trends in cuisines go in Asia, this is a single grain of sand in the 2000 year old hourglass.

I'm guessing you toss it into risotto.

Thats interesting. I was told by some fairly knowledgeable Chinese people that Mongolian barbeque, at least as how we see it in the US, is a fairly recent invention in Taiwan. Recently being the last 20 years or so What you eat in Ulan Bataar is NOT the make your own stir fry stuff you get at "Mongolian Barbeques". For what its worth, traditional or not, I really like it. For "real" Mongolian food have a look at http://ulaanbaatar.net/food/ see also http://dmoz.org/Home/Cooking/World_Cuisine...sian/Mongolian/

For those of you that like to shop at the mammorth Palisades Center on the weekends, which is conveniently close to both NYC and Northern NJ, you may want to consider one of these two mongolian BBQ restaurants as lunch and dinner choices: Stir Crazy http://www.stircrazy.com (in the Palisades Center Mall itself. Read epinions.com review of this chain) Khan's, on route 303 in Blauvelt (about 2 minutes down the road from the mall) *** Being that we were in the mall, we decided to try Stir Crazy for lunch. The place bills itself as "fresh asian cuisine" and is a chain restaurant that has been around for quite a few years now, although it is new to the Tri-State area. Conceptually, its similar to mongolian barbeque, which is essentially that you have a raw bar of various ingredients (veggies and meats and sauces and seasonings) that you throw in a bowl and the cook throws onto a large circular shaped griddle and stirs up for you -- except in this case, the meat portion is controlled by the restaurant and instead of a griddle they throw it in a high heated wok for you to watch behind a plexiglass splatter screen. Being an expensive mall-type gimmick restaurant, the decoration has all the bells and whistles of similar type asian joints for the masses like Ruby Foo's, with giant chopsticks being suspended from the ceiling, orange and black decor, knicknacks hanging from the walls, you know the deal. The menu consists of the aforementioned stir frys, which range from $12-$16 depending upon which meat you pick to go with your other ingredients. You also at order time chose whether or not you want noodles to be thrown in (there are 3 to chose from, lo mein, chow fun and shanghai) or rice to be served on the side. In addition to various appetizers, there are also stand alone dishes you can order, most of which come from the same pool of ingredients in the "market" that you could otherwise throw together yourself in the stir frys, although they go for a few dollars less. If you get a stir fry, you're issued a small metal wok about the size of a soup bowl which you are told to throw all the vegetables you want into. Indeed, the raw "market", which is laid out like a salad bar, contains an array of very fresh sliced and julienned vegetables. After you've shoved as many veggies you want into the wok, you go to the sauce bar, and are instructed to put two ladles of one of the dozen pre-mixed sauce combos into the small sauce cup attached to the wok. You're advised not to mix the sauces. For our trial, we used strictly "szechuan" sauce which was a soy and chili base. We further spiced this up by adding a ton of fresh minced garlic and minced ginger, as well as some whole dried sichuan chile peppers that we crushed up into the mix. Other sauces: Classic Chinese Thai Barbecue Thai Curry Garlic Ginger Kung Pao Black Bean Szechwan Spicy Basil Teriyaki Szechwan Black Bean Sweet & Sour Peanut The stir fry came out pretty damn good, although a bit watery, as they add water when doing the stir fry as well as a slurry of cornstarch as they see fit, and we used a decent amount of spinach which probably contributed to the wateryness -- upon seeing our choice of veggies, the cook should have compensated with less water accordingly, but he did not. This particlular stir fry we chose flank steak, which the chef added from a little baggie from his mise-en-place as the whole thing was thrown into the wok. The steak was of good quality albeit of miniscule quantity. We also tried two of the off-the-shelf dishes, kung pao chicken, and a basil chicken with noodles. Suffice to say, the kung pao, which was billed as a "double flame" dish indicating its level of spicyness, was pretty wimpy. The portion of meat itself was a bit lame for a $9 dish, although the chicken and veggies were of good quality. The same could be said of the basil chicken noodles, which needed some additional chile oomph. I suggest that if you are going to bother to eat at this place, you go the do it yourself route. Overall, I'd say if you are in the mall, are tired and hungry, the place is worth a visit, and a good alternative to the food court, but keep in mind we think its a bit of a rip off considering its mongolian restaurant roots, which are much more affordable. *** As a comparison, for dinner we tried Khan's, a traditional mongolian restaurant, a few minutes down route 303. The beat-up looking chinese restaurant has been there since the late 80's, so no gimmicks here. You are charged $15 per person and its all you can eat -- you shove as much meat and veggies as you want into a bowl and you go up as many times as you want. This place is totally no nonsense and the food is great. The service is attentive and they start feeding you the second you sit down. For appetizers, we were given a healthy complimentary dish of peel and eat shrimp with cocktail sauce, a lettuce vinagrette with chopped peanuts, a order of steamed pork siu mai dim sum (tasty), and your choice of soup -- wonton, seafood or hot and sour. Jon and I had the hot and sour, which I thought was a pretty good specimen but I opted not to fill up on it. Rachel had the seafood, I didn't try it. The meat bar consists of troughs of frozen thinly sliced ribeye steak, chicken, lamb, pork and small peeled shrimp. Everything tasted pretty fresh, including the shrimp, so I presume it all goes pretty quickly because the restaurant was really busy. The veggie bar was pretty standard fare, consisting of carrots, scallions, mushrooms, mini corn cobs, carrots, onions, broccoli, cabbage, sliced bell peppers, bokchoy, lomein noodle, chowfun noodle, medium firm tofu cubes, green chile pepper slices, and a few other things that escape me, I'd say about 16 items in all. Then theres the liquid bar, which allows you to tweak the seasonings -- rice wine, sugar water, soy sauce, oyster sauce, fresh ginger, fresh garlic, sesame oil. Once you toss all of this into a bowl, you tell the chef which choice of sauces you want -- teriyaki, sweet and sour, bbq, black bean, chef special (the last two being the spicer options) and he throws it all on the circular griddle. Not to be missed are the taiwan-style sesame "buns" which are brought to table to be used to stuff your stirfry into. These are chewy, with a toasty sesame flavor albeit a bit doughy, so you might want to pull out some of the interior before stuffing them. For dessert, theres sliced fresh fruit (watermelon and honeydew and an assortment of other stuff) and also ice cream. They serve a killer coconut ice cream, with real coconut peices in it, and a very good orange sherbet, which tastes like orange creamsicle. They also had the green pistachio and chocolate flavors, which we didnt try. All in all I would say this place is a definite go, we'll be coming back to this one for sure. If you walk out of this joint still hungry, there's something wrong with you.

Nina's correct. A Gibson is gin, dry vermouth and an onion. A Gimlet is gin and lime juice (traditionally Rose's, which adds some sugar to the mix). Very tasty. Very dangerous. Nina, aren't you going to tell us how it turned out? Okay right. Thats what Philip Marlowe liked to drink, I think.

If you can find it Hendrick's makes a wicked martini. Lemon peel? Olive? (I know that cocktail onions make it a Gibson). What kind of olives should I buy? You mean a Gimlet.

I really dug that French 75 you made. Whats the recipe for that?

add Rachel to the list.

They had some other potato dishes (a garlic potatoes and a spicy potato one comes to mind) which sounded more interesting than the regular fried potatoes -- next time we'll try them. Usually doing bad papas fritas are a major strike against a Spanish restaurant, but given how excellent everything else was in compensation, it's forgiven.